For the rest, she imbibed readily enough at this time many of
the particular views of religious subjects affected by the
nuns, at first, indeed, not without a certain incredulity that
such things could be, when her father had never spoken to her
about them, nor made her aware of their existence; but
presently, with more confidence, as she remembered that he was
to have told her all about them when she was older. There were
the legends and histories of the saints, for instance, in
which Madelon learnt to take special delight, though it way be
feared that she regarded them rather as pretty romantic
stories, illustrated and glorified by her recollections of the
old pictures in Florence, than as the vehicle of religious
instruction that the nuns would willingly have made them. She
used to beg Soeur Lucie to tell them to her again and again,
and the good little nun, delighted to find at least one pious
disposition in her small rebellious charge, was always ready
to comply with her request, and went over the whole list of
saints and their lives, not sparing one miracle or miraculous
virtue we may be sure, and telling them all in her simple,
matter-of-fact language, with details drawn from her daily
life to give a touch of reality, which invested the mystic old
Eastern and Southern legends with a quaint naive homeliness
not without its own charm--like the same subjects as
interpreted by some of the old Dutch and Flemish masters, in
contrast with the high-wrought, idealised conceptions of the
earlier Italian schools.
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